Jaeger-LeCoultre Rendez-Vous Notebook Diamonds & Emeralds - ref. 421.1.09 - c. 1990-2000

A Diamond as a Diary

Description

A rotating bezel, a diamond set on it, and everything is said: this Jaeger-LeCoultre remarkably lives up to its name. You turn the bezel until the diamond is opposite the time of your next appointment, and you no longer have to think about it. It's not a complication; it's better: it's a reminder.

Everything else is of great simplicity. A round 18-carat yellow gold case, a mother-of-pearl dial without any indices, where only the House's signature interrupts the reflections. This watch tells nothing but the time, and the one you are waiting for.

Around the dial runs a ring alternately set with diamonds and emeralds, matched by a dark green alligator strap signed Jaeger-LeCoultre. The harmony is one that owes nothing to chance. This gem-set configuration is rare on this reference: we present it to you as it reached us.

How to wear it?

Thirty millimeters of yellow gold: the Carnet de Rendez-Vous has more presence on the wrist than most women's watches of its generation, without ever becoming ostentatious. Its thin profile allows it to slip effortlessly under a shirt sleeve.

Its quartz movement makes it a watch that you pick up without thinking, in the morning, before a day that won't allow time to wind it. The gesture of moving the diamond remains: the only ritual this watch requires, and the most elegant one there is.

Why did Françoise choose it?

Because Jaeger-LeCoultre is the House that connoisseurs recognize and that others have not yet encountered. It is nicknamed "the watchmaker's watchmaker" because, from the Vallée de Joux, the manufacture long supplied movements to the biggest names in Place Vendôme, without ever signing the dials. Wearing a Jaeger-LeCoultre is, in a way, going back to the source.

Françoise was especially drawn to the design's intention. The diamond on the bezel is not an ornament added to feminize a man's watch: it has a function, it serves to mark a time. It is an object designed for a woman with a schedule, and that idea has not aged.

Finally, she loves that this watch was composed as a whole, down to the green of its strap matching the emeralds. You encounter a hundred Cartiers before a Carnet de Rendez-Vous, and this one also has something that the others don't.

History

Jaeger-LeCoultre was born in 1833 in Le Sentier, in the Vallée de Joux, at the initiative of Antoine LeCoultre. The manufacture quickly distinguished itself by its complete mastery of the watchmaking chain, to the point of becoming the discreet supplier to the greatest Houses of Place Vendôme: hence the nickname "watchmaker's watchmaker," which has remained. The hyphenated name appeared in 1937, following the merger with the Parisian watchmaker Edmond Jaeger.

The House has long had a special relationship with women's watchmaking. In 1929, it presented the Caliber 101, the smallest mechanical movement in the world—a record it still holds—designed to slip into exceptionally thin jewel watches. The Carnet de Rendez-Vous belongs to another family, that of dress watches that the House introduced in the 1990s in 25 and 30 mm, in steel and gold as well as in 14 and 18-carat gold.

What distinguishes it lies entirely in its reminder mechanism. In 2012, Jaeger-LeCoultre launched a women's collection called Rendez-Vous, whose signature is a mobile star that marks the time of an appointment around the dial: the same idea, twenty years later. The House officially dates this collection to 2012; it is therefore a lineage of ideas rather than a claimed continuity. The original name, however, is indeed this: Carnet de Rendez-Vous.